Precision Farming: Zenvus Signs a Mammoth Contract in Africa

Two weeks ago, a wholly-owned business of Fasmicro Group, Zenvus, signed a mammoth contract on precision farming with other components with the largest farmers’ co-op in Africa.

The Founder, Ndubuisi Ekekwe, Ph.D, a faculty in Carnegie Mellon University said, “ My colleagues were fascinated with AIs for driverless cars, social media, etc. For me, I saw African agriculture ( and our other two nexus) waiting for the disruptive powers of AI, mobile, cloud and IoT”.

“ I am confident that my generation will “cure” hunger. For everyone of us, there is a promise – an optimism that the next generation will only read about poverty in books. We must win on circuits, codes and business models. Our best investors are African customers and I challenge us to innovate with the fierce urgency of now,” Dr. Ekekwe declared.

Zenvus is an intelligent solution for farms that uses proprietary electronics sensors to collect soil data like moisture, nutrients, pH etc and send them to a cloud server via GSM, satellite or Wifi.

Algorithms in the server analyze the data and advice farmers on farming. As the crops grow, the system deploys special spectral cameras to build crop vegetative health indices (NDVI) which helps detect drought stress, pest and diseases.

According to Fasmicro Group, the system has the capability to tell a farm what, how, and when to farm. Zenvus, using the aggregated data, builds platforms for lending, insurance, trading etc for farmers.